Hi Friends,
Greetings from New York! Today’s missive comes to you from the lounge of the funky, inexpensive and charming Colonial House Inn in New York’s Chelsea district. We return home Saturday, and I’ll be roasting coffee again on Sunday (March 28), then delivering and shipping the next day. Please send your orders for this week by Sunday morning (though we have a few pounds on hand if you need something Saturday). The coffees for this week are shown on the site.
This location has had the great benefit of being right in the middle of a cluster of cafes that offer coffees from the most famed roasters in the U.S., among them Terroir, Inteligentsia, Stumptown, 49th Parallel, Counter Culture and Ecco, and we’ve centered the mornings on this trip on sampling them all and getting to know the upper echelon of the New York coffee scene. The common denominator for these shops is a fanatic devotion to quality coffee preparation, dedicated staffs who know their coffee and their craft, and the great advantage of being situated in a city with so many people that they can focus their businesses almost exclusively on coffee and not much else.
We first visited 9th Street Espresso’s stand in the Chelsea Marketplace, a renovated former 1890 New York Biscuit Company bakery that now houses a rabbit’s warren of gourmet food shops (they also have two cafes in the East Village). 9th Street takes its espresso very seriously, offering a menu of seven standard espresso drinks (featuring its proprietary Alphabet City blend roasted by Intelligentsia), a drip coffee of the day, and coffee by the pound. No mints, blender drinks, smoothies, commuter mugs or finger food, and straight shots of espresso are available only in ceramic cups (no paper!). The two busy La Marzocco machines, which would have been the showpieces of any other cafes, had their names blacked out, in the manner of a top-secret experimental car. And of course, the espresso was sublime.
The next morning, I ducked out early to pick up some coffees for us at Joe the Art of Coffee, around the corner from our hotel. Joe, with coffees from Santa Rosa, CA’s Ecco Café, operates five comfortable shops around the city, and at it’s Joe University, they offer a nice selection of classes in coffee basics, espresso techniques, cupping and brewing fundamentals. Such a great service. Our neighborhood Joe offered a standard coffee of the day, espresso drinks, tea and a few baked goods. After noon each day, they expand the menu to include a selection of pourover brews (by the cup), but in the mornings, their volume is too great to allow the time to prepare coffee this way. We talked for a bit, and they kindly offered to make me some individual cups of their Ethiopia Sidamo and Papua New Guinea. We enjoyed these a lot.
And for a second cup that morning, we walked ten blocks or so to the almost too cool for its own good Ace Hotel to visit the New York outpost of Stumptown Coffee, best known for ruling the Portland Oregon coffee scene. Stumptown has just started east coast operations in a new roastery in Red Hook, and the Ace location is its first dedicated retail presence in the city. Both Ace and the Stumptown shop have an old American ambiance to them, with the shop’s bartistas nattily outfitted in fedoras, skinny ties and striped shirts. Two busy La Marzocco Mistrals (SO nice!) handle the espresso traffic, and a drip coffee of the day is made in large press pots and then transferred to airpots. A small selection of baked goods is available, but the emphasis is clearly on the coffee. Long lines ran out the door of the café and into the hotel lobby both times we were there.
My explorations the next morning took me a few blocks from our hotel to the quiet, unobtrusive Café Grumpy. This small neighborhood storefront, one of three Grumpy shops in the city, is identified only with a round, rusted iron grumpy face over the door, and it would be easy to miss it if you didn’t know it was there. But here again, it is all about the coffee. Along with its signature Heartbreaker Espresso, a short menu of three daily coffees is prepared on two Clover machines. The Sumatra Lintong Nihuta and Colombia Monserrate were the standout drip coffees of the trip, and I really loved the intimacy of this small shop.
We also made several stops at Think Coffee’s wonderful NYU location, a few blocks from the always-entertaining Washington Square. In the way the other cafes we visited meld so well with their environments (busy marketplace, neighborhoods, bustling downtown), Think is at its heart a college town café. Two large seating areas packed with students socializing, reading and surfing the Internet. A nice menu of espresso drinks and a rotating selection of single origin coffees prepared in press pots. Beer and wine and nice food. And a friendly and welcoming staff. And the energy that comes only with a college coffee scene. Cafes like this are my favorite hangouts in the world, and I wished I lived down the street from this one.
I had met Think’s owner Jason Scher in a class a few years ago, and we had a nice meeting with he and his colleague Matt Fury to talk about the world of coffee and coffee education. And at the end, they did us the great honor of ordering some of our humble coffee to be served in their shop starting next week. It is very rewarding to know that we will share the grinder with coffees from 49th Parallel and Terroir.
There are still way too many Starbucks in New York (though it feels like there are fewer now than a few years ago), and their direction in coffee these days is sad to me. From the door of each of their shops screams a large sign: Bold! Pike’s Place Roast. $1.50.
I have been no big fan of Starbucks heavy handed expansion strategy in recent years, and to my taste, their coffee is roasted far too dark, but I have felt gratitude toward the company for its role in the last twenty years in spreading awareness of specialty coffee in our country. With its network of stores and advertising, Starbucks had a major role in helping people know more about espresso and espresso drinks, and its promotion of coffee origins greatly expanded public knowledge about the linage of the coffees they drank each day.
But this course has now given way to one based on profit. By focusing less on coffees from individual origins and more on a single house blend (with a base of commodity coffees) our industry has lost the benefit of having a ubiquitous player in the market help with educating the public. Sigh.
Stay tuned in the next week for details on a string of new coffees coming over the next month, among them new offerings from Burundi, Rwanda, Sumatra, Brazil, Costa Rica and Ethiopia. There are some truly special coffees coming in this round, and I’ll be sharing the backgrounds on these with you in the weeks ahead.
Thanks for your support, folks - enjoy the weekend!
Kent
